Xiaomi Mi3 has arrived in India and this smartphone will be available from 22nd July via flipkart. This smartphone has high-end specifications and its price of mere Rs. 13,999 speaks volumes about Xiaomi’s aggressive marketing strategies in India and about its business model. They will not be spending money on marketing but would be promoting their devices via social media platforms and through media fraternity. At yesterday’s launch event in New Delhi, we had the opportunity to fiddle with this smartphone for few minutes and found it to be quite interesting. Here are our few impressions :
The design of Xiomi Mi3 is quite elegant and gives a feel of premium smartphone. Its body is made of anodized aluminum metal and has curved edges, flat top which also houses a sim card slot and 3.5mm headset jack. This smartphoe reminds one of Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone. This phone is 8.1mm thick, weighs 145 grams and is easy to carry. Moreover, the feel of the phone is so good that you cannot make out that you are not carrying the premium branded phone. On this phone, the power and volume keys are placed at the right edge. The speaker grill and micro-USB port have been provided at the bottom edge. For navigation, there are three capacitive keys below the display and a 2MP front-facing camera has been fixed above the display on the front.
From hardware perspective, the Mi3 has scored a sixer. It has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 chipset under the hood paired with 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal storage but unfortuantely this phone does not have provision to extend the internal storage. We played with this smartphone for few minutes to test the running of apps and did not notice any lag while launching and switching between the apps. On this aspect, we would like to have further anylysis when we receive the device for detailed review. The other aspect we would like to test is the heating problem on Snapdragon 800 chipset, which we have experienced on Gionee Slim smartphone.
Xiaomi Mi 3 sports a 5-inch full-HD (1080p, 441ppi,) IPS LCD display, which is quite impressive. Its display reproduces bright and vivid colors. The quality of text and pictures is crisp and sharp and the viewing angles are also very good.
Xiaomi Mi 3 runs MiUi 5, which is Xiaomi’s own operating system based on Android 4.4 KitKat. Although, we do not prefer customised UI’s, but Xiaomi claims it is user friendly. Xiaomi also keep on updating its software with weekly software updates and tweaks. However, you will have to spend some time to get used to MiUi. During our brief handling, we did not face any problem to run it and non-Android users will be familiarised with it quite fast.
The other interesting feature noticed by us was that MiUi offers various themes and some of them are India specific also. The demo unit with an India theme looked impressive with its colourful icon set and beautiful wallpapers.
Even in optics department, Xiaomi has done well on Mi3. This smartphone is equipped with a 13MP rear camera with dual-LED flash and 2-megapixel front facing cameras for selifes. Both the cameras have the capabilites to shoot videos in 1080p resolution. We snapped few images on the camera of Mi3 and found the quality to be quite decent. More on this can be commented after our detailed analysis.
To sum up, the Xiaomi Mi3 has good build design, comes with strong hardware and its display and optics are quite impressive. Moreover, the price point of Rs. 13,999/- is so attractive that it will lure anybody to grab this. Xiaomi is headed by technocrats, who have worked in leading companies like Google, Microsoft and Motorola. At the launch event, they have shown lot of enthusiasm to succeed in India. Moreover, with their wide network of service set-up, they will not disppoint the Indian customers.
Good days are ahead for Indian consumers who wish to have good device at affordable price.
